Hi.After practicing for a while in sp battles i decided to move to mp.Before doing that i tested the preformance for 3v3 and 4v4 as i had not done those before.I know my laptop is not gaming-oriented, but the performance curve puzzled me a bit:On 1v1 and 2v2 I habitually use the following settings:-shader:3 high-texture:ultra-units: high-particle effects: high-texture filter: anisotropic x4-units size: medium-shadows: medium-everithing else on the lowest setting (or unchecked boxes)

And i get smooth performances. The only difference is that the 4x speed (fastest) is not smooth on 2v2.

Turning to 3v3 I noticed some bad fps, so i tried to scale down the setting expecting to find some optimal point.I did trial after trial without noticing any difference, and eventually decided to find the sweet spot from the bottom up.

I put all settings on the lowest possible value (really all of them, save for units size) and turns out.... I can barely notice any difference in performance from where i started!

Tried 4v4 and it's the same thing, only with worse fps.

Even tried to lower resoluton, but it's no different. (besides things become whay out of scale so ... not the ideal solution)

I have never noticed this issue in vanilla because of its puny little armies.

Has anyone had this issue before? Just want to gather feedback...

P.S.I have a Acer Swift 3 with i5-8250u quad core as a CPU, 8GB of RAM and nvidia mx 150 as a graphic card.While handling the game the ram sits comfortably at 60%, the overall CPU usage is something between 55% and 65% (with 2 cores nearly maxed out) and the nvidia card seems to fluctuate between 40% and 80%.(Values taken from Windows resouce monitor)

Experiencing low fps during big battles is fairly common, even with good rigs (especially when zooming in). If you tested the performance in SP, you might want to consider the lag caused by the AI controlling such a vast amount of units on the field - I've seen it cause extreme lag before, to the point of rendering battles unplayable.

Kevin wrote:Experiencing low fps during big battles is fairly common, even with good rigs (especially when zooming in). If you tested the performance in SP, you might want to consider the lag caused by the AI controlling such a vast amount of units on the field - I've seen it cause extreme lag before, to the point of rendering battles unplayable.

Yes, as you may know from SP games, when playing Empire:Total War with Darthmod especially, (the engine is the same), the Frames can drop as low as 10 fps and you will have to play 10 minutes like this because of the massive 1v1 fight scripts happening. It really doesnt matter on the rig, the game engine sometimes just cannot handle a large amount of units, and especially if its stacked up in a massive blob in one place (Which is the AI's #1 favorite tactic)

If you tested the performance in SP, you might want to consider the lag caused by the AI controlling such a vast amount of units on the field

In a MP battle this problem would disappear, right?Just to be sure, does the following situation come from the AI struggling? Consider two different battles: 1) 4vs4 on small units size, 31 units per army, total men on battlefield: 4152. 2) 1vs1 on huge units size, 31 units per army, total men on the battlefield 31832. The second battle was more fluent than the first, something like 7 fps vs 15, which would seem completely bollocks at first sight. (The performance does not change between the first moments and full engagement)

Another strange thing I noticed is that when I see the game progressing at 5 fps, the Steam fps counter says 25-35. I know that the steam fps counter is supposed to refresh slower, but the bad performance is actually constant, so I'm still trying to understand why the numbers shown are different from what you see...could this point to the source of the problem?

in MP, there is no AI unless someone crashes. The problem occurs, as far as I'm aware, when there are several AI armies with many units each. I don't know why exactly this causes the massive lag, but putting it simply: yes, the AI struggles with the command of so many units.

I don't think your issue is coming about from the amount of soldiers on the field. it's most likely due to the AI, as stated above. That is also what your tests seem to confirm. As for the fps, it could be that the graphics card is rendering images faster than the game can handle the AI calculations, causing the game to appear sluggish and laggy, regardless of fps (I'm merely speculating, I don't know this for a fact). Remember that the game has a set amount of memory it can use. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for processing power (which might be why none of your hardware showed peaking on the resource monitor).

Your best bet would be to hop into a multiplayer game (preferably 3v3) and find out.

Having Generals in the AI armies does help them organize their units more efficiently.

Thanks for the useful tip, but does this make the AI "smarter" or does it actually affect game performance?

Remember that the game has a set amount of memory it can use. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for processing power (which might be why none of your hardware showed peaking on the resource monitor).

Is this related to the video memory value on the preferences_script.txt?

To be fair i've checked again and the graphics card does actually max out when looking at a big dense group of men all zoomed inBut i still get 28-30 fps (actual ones in 2v2 and "nominal" in 3v3 because of stuttering), which is actually perfect.

Further reading across the web has led me to conclude that there is no universal fix for this well known "stuttering", tried some of the solution proposed around but no one proved worthy.

Given that my graphic card is recent there are not many drivers that support it... nonetheless I may try to change that.

Your best bet would be to hop into a multiplayer game (preferably 3v3) and find out.

I'll certainly try, given that I find available people to take the chance.

I've never noticed any performance changes after fiddling with the video memory setting, so I left it to be as is. But others claim they have. The rendering of all the soldiers in their uniforms heavily impacts performance when zooming in, especially when there are several units next to each other, or even, on top of one another. Graphics settings should have an effect on lag caused in this way though (especially unit detail, etc.).